Manage your pipeline for accounting with airSlate SignNow

How to create outlook signature

[Music] [Music] a podcast series by the association for accounting marketing I am Katie Tolan CPA growth guides and joining me today is Gayle Crosley Gabel is president of Crosley and company where she helps firm drive Tom's drive revenue through the discipline of practice growth she's also the author of the crossroads and in this book she takes a fictional look at a CPA firm that is struggling and how it achieves tremendous success by calling her practice growth discipline so Gayle thank you for joining us today thank you maybe it's great to be here with you so today we're going to be talking about managing your pipeline a process there are many firms that have nothing there are some firms that have a document and a process around that opportunity to proceed so I want to talk about the document itself but also that bigger picture of everything that entails so why don't you start us off what's the difference between just a pipeline and an opportunity to process a pipeline is a document so it's an Excel or some other document which is an inventory of all the pursuits across the firm and you may also have personal pipelines that are just for individuals or for segments like industries or service lines but the pipeline that I recommend is the firm white pipeline which has all the open and active opportunities on a pipeline document for high visibility within the firm but the document itself is not enough to really drive the behaviors that you need in order to increase the wind rates of the opportunity process what you need is a process around it which enables you to look at the pipeline on a frequent basis with all the leaders of the firm and drive a review of the pipeline with next steps and follow-up items and so forth that really gets you where you need to be so in the first place with the pipeline its it's a document that can be published and stuck in a drawer nobody does anything with and doesn't do much for you or a process which really drives behavioural change in optimizes wind rates so let's talk about that document itself you know I know there are firms that you see are a more proper approximately some other sort of software track there are a few things that are critical the definitions of what belongs on it and doesn't belong on it is pretty important so you've got to have these stages that are from unqualified through final stage and formatted in a way that is easy to read and that doesn't have too much information on it but has enough so it's like a balance sheet or an income statement that has certain formats and layouts you can pick one up anywhere anytime and if you're an accountant you can see what exactly you're looking at and you have current assets and non current assets and they mean things to people and the same thing is true on a pipeline the definitions are important the other thing that's important is to get the stuff off the pipeline that has either been won or lost so that it only has open and active opportunities once something comes through the pipeline and is either won or lost what happens is it gets pulled off your pipeline and is put on a win-loss report and it's an inventory as opposed to the pipeline which is an inventory of the open and actives this is an inventory losses year to date or 12-month rolling and now from high to low the winds and from high to low the losses and that would be high to low in dollar amounts and then I calculated win rate which is wins over total opportunities and percent of win dollars over total opportunity dollars because it's so easy to get distracted with all the daily things that we have to do to think of business development and growth as something as a extracurricular activity as an afterthought and the high-growth firms and firms that are really sophisticated with growth and have really good sustainable growth are the winds that realize that they need some mechanism to pull growth front and center on a continuing basis and the pipeline processes the thing that does that it enables you to have everybody in the leadership position get on the phone for a half hour every other week and review the open and active opportunities and and go right through it when I facilitate pipeline reviews is okay here's the first opportunity what's your next step what's your next step due date here's your second opportunity who's the leader the leaders name is there what's the next step in next step due date so it drives the process of keeping the momentum in the selling cycle which is so very critical to maintaining a high odds to win what's next what's the due date I think a lot of people think yeah because what you did is yesterday's news great you did it the question is what are you going to do next and the hardest part in selling is to transfix figure out the next step and the next step due date because next steps are what keeps the thing moving and alive and if you are really good at selling next steps then you will win the prize more often than not if you're unclear as to what the next is if you don't have a committed timeframe and next step action item with the prospect then that sends a red flag up and those red flags are are evident when you have your pipeline review and when you have the pipeline review in CDs if you're the facilitator like the managing partner you can have interventions you can see that someone's in over their head and it doesn't know exactly how to handle this or the opportunity was something that they had never seen before and you can with that intervention deploy resources and shift your maneuvers in order to increase the odds to win you know you just mentioned the facilitator you recommend facilitate these meetings or can someone else take that role the managing partner because the people that are in the room are the partners and they're beholden to him they're not beholding necessarily to anybody else in the firm and sometimes not even to themselves but they do have a certain responsibility that they think in their mind making sure they don't let the managing partner down and that he is driving the firm and his job is to drive the growth of the firm so it's not something that can be easily debated you are responsible as the head of a of a company or a CPA firm to drive the growth of the firm that's your job so you know you're talking a little bit about selling next steps and why that's so instrumental and it really got me thinking about sales training well sales training is interesting because the basic sales training that most of our or many of our accounts get is very basic it's you know how to shake a hand and hold a conversation but training that is that the very optimal level like landing the big fish it's a workshop that I do really focuses less on techniques and more on the application of the of the techniques to the situation at hand so like for example qualifying a lead and knowing how to qualify a lead is critical because if you don't qualify the lead then you waste a lot of time in spinning wheels and so forth the pipeline process shows the unqualified leads that are in the pipeline in the minute that they hit the pipeline that is when they're unqualified and this is the time where most of the mistakes are made that lead to losses so the pipeline enables you to have visibility to the opportunities and then opportunity training enables you to learn how to apply methods and so forth to actually win the opportunity so do firms that that have some sort of sales training with methodology for success it depends they may have more success with the smaller opportunities and the firm-wide pipeline is designed to capture the large opportunities the ones that are larger than normal therefore they are more significant to the firm and those opportunities have a different necessity because the basic training won't necessarily give them the tools that are required for these complex opportunities being larger more than one decision maker and one or more competitors and when you get into that realm you have to up your game and really learn a lot of techniques that are not taught necessarily in basic sales training you need to get to very advanced sales training in order to really make that happen partner yes look outside the firm and look for training programs that are at a very high level of training those with solutions selling programs I don't see very many in our profession they're mostly over in the corporate side corporate America side because this is where they've been selling large opportunities for a long time and probably of anything that I brought over from corporate America that's been the most valuable because there was a whole a market hole that I saw here and you really need to for the large opportunities take advantage of trainers that train at that very high-level with these long long selling cycles large opportunities that are really a solution selling so one question we hear discussion land store just in meetings with people is meeting for a long time now maybe five years and its really getting stale so for those people what tips do you have to keep these meetings fresh so that people are engaged got it it probably has to do with with some of the mechanics of either the length of the meeting the timeframes over which the meetings occur the people that are in the meeting or the facilitators so best practices are number one have the managing partner facilitate it if that managing partner is not a very good facilitator then I'll give you a few tips that they can pass some of their managing partners secondly to keep the pipeline reviews at a half-hour even for the very very large firms that I work with it's a half hour and that way you can click through the opportunity very very quickly and not get people off track talking about this that and the other thing a half hour every other week every other week gives you enough of a of a frequency where you you can you can have momentum but not so often that people are overloaded with having to show up on a phone call use a conference call bridge so it's easy for people to get on on the bridge and they don't have to come into the office and then what you want to do with the pipeline call is to mix it up so sometimes when I facilitate I'll start at the top of the pipeline sometimes I'll start at the bottom sometimes I'll start with the new ones that are on it sometimes I'll start with the ones that have had activity sometimes I'll do it by industry sometimes I'll do it by service line and so I mix it up a lot and and and listening for certain things like does this person or this team really know what they're doing if it's just nearly a reporting in and and not a listening for where you where someone needs help it can become very stale and sometimes I find that it's stale because the training has not been executed along with the pipeline implementation so if you have pipeline implementation but you have no training and people are making the same old mistakes over and over then I can see whereas sometimes it would get stale because of that so the pipeline is designed to give visibility and illumination so you can have interventions and and and also very short snippets of information like ABC company the CFO and I talked last week I qualify the lead the lead the next step now is going to be in two weeks from now we're going to get together again and drill deeper into some of his basic issues you know that kind of thing and that's it okay now let's go on to the next lead so sometimes they get really stale because people are off track and off-course and the facilitator needs to keep them right on to the next step and next step due date that's where it needs to be so you talked about looking for ways to help what's the interaction very much it's about the the group itself because what I usually do is I start with the win-loss report and I say let's first celebrate all any wins that we had since the last time and they're color-coded in a light green so we can very easily see the lines that were either one since the last time or lost since the last time so let's start celebrating our wins Joe please tell us about your win what was the key to the win why did we win and he may say something like well we already had an end because I've been courting the guy for the last two years okay that's interesting more interesting what ones are tell me a little bit about why we won or lost and they'll say something like we we were able to put together a strategy which was a win strategy and here's what it was those are the ones I look for and listen for and sometimes you have to probe around to find that because people tend to be overly modest and don't you know say okay because I had a really good strategy and so the the wins and losses are the ones that we start with first and really get you know get them talking and also often say does anybody else have a question or a comment about that win and someone on the team will say well Joe's being too modest what really happen is that kind of thing so you talked about the meetings being every two weeks and in 30 minutes and led by the managing partner what happens when the managing partner takes a two-week vacation usually have someone sitting in to facilitate and in fact I have that coming up where my managing partner is going on sabbatical for six weeks so I'm going to facilitate the next three calls for medication from the pipeline call and it's very important for people to actually show up on the call we have a situation right now where we just got it up and running and our first pipeline call we had several key people who didn't show up so they haven't gotten the memo yet on how important this is and the managing partner is going to have to have some conversations with them and I said if you only have a piece of your team showing up on the calls and you don't and you don't say it's for everybody and are able to make that happen then I just say pull the plug I mean there's no point in having half of the firm's sitting there half of them partners sitting there and the other half not in the room and think that it's going to be a really powerful process because it loses its momentum at that point so I know you love metrics so as you're going through this opportunity pursuit process there are a couple of key KPIs the first one is the win rate dollars won and opportunities won and my very best firms have a win rate that's somewhere between 60 and 70 percent and except for the ones that have really heavy nonprofit and government practices that tends to come down but 60 to 70 percent would be the very best and then the other KPI is the percent of total annual revenues that are in the pipeline at any point in time so if we have a $10,000,000 firm and we have a million dollars of open and active opportunities in the pipeline at any point in time that's ten percent of annual firm revenues and that's a that's a a good solid you know performance my best firm has been averaging twenty about twenty eight to thirty eight percent in late four years and they're one of the highest growth firms in the country I have other firms that the win rate is down or I'm sorry the pipeline dollars is are down but between three and six percent and they're not growing so it's a wonderful metric to show whether you're a high-growth or a no growth firm or something in the middle question for you because I know you've helped many firms implement this oppertunity process pipelines is there one thing that you think is instrumental to success or on the reverse side is there one obstacle that they're going to have to overcome to be successful one thing the one thing is the managing partner facilitating the pipeline review all right no thank you so much I think you provided us a lot of information around how do we take this opportunity process within our firm and make it more than just a plate lined document that sits on a shelf and collects dust so nurse oh thank you Katie sure this wraps up another episode of amplifying watch for another podcast from the Association for a county marketing next month and always remember to aim high [Music] me we've got [Music] [Music]